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Galleries: Hanno Otten's JAGR: Projects at Rittenhouse Hotel

Looking down the long, coolly lit hallway space that is JAGR: Projects, you could mistake Hanno Otten's photographs for abstract silkscreen prints or paintings. And you would almost be correct.

Looking down the long, coolly lit hallway space that is JAGR: Projects, you could mistake Hanno Otten's photographs for abstract silkscreen prints or paintings. And you would almost be correct.

Otten's vividly colored images are photographs of his own paintings.

Some depict sections of paintings blown up to a monumental scale; others capture close-up details. They're both painting and photograph, in other words, but physically realized for the viewer as the latter. For that matter, they're more closely related to conceptual art than to painting or photography. Color and abstraction are his subjects, as opposed to consuming passions. Marcel Duchamp, Herbert Bayer, Josef Albers, and Gerhard Richter would seem to be his guiding lights.

Four of the five large photographs on view here from his "Lichtbilder" series, made in 2007, show seemingly kinetic compositions of overlapping concentric circles (Marcel Duchamp's Rotoreliefs come to mind), rectangles, and trapezoids. An anomaly of this group, Lichtbild #172, is a minimal, contemplative composition reminiscent of a Mark Rothko painting, its center field of inky blue framed by rectangles of maroon at the top and bottom. You forget, for a moment, that it's a photograph.

The small photographs from this year that make up his "Boulevard" series suggest details of deliberately blurred landscape paintings, as well as blurred details of drippy abstract paintings, and signal a new direction for Otten, whose earlier images, though commonly soft- edged, are characterized by their clarity. Emotion, possibly always there, is closer to the surface. Im Park (also from 2010), a grid of 21 small photographs, each of which depicts a section of a blurred landscape painting in greens, yellows, and browns, offers the most intriguing iteration of Otten's blurring manipulations, suggesting memories of views of a park as observed through the window of a moving car.

Tactile color

The almost-exact opposite of Otten could be Vivian Wolovitz, as hands-on and painterly an abstract painter as they come - like Otten a bold and surprising colorist, but of a different bent. The surfaces of Wolovitz's paintings, now exhibited at Projects Gallery, are so layered, so heavily impastoed, you suspect she'd welcome a comparison between her paintings and topographic maps, if not with the Earth itself.

Night/Day, a large, vertical painting whose last coating is of blue-green paint, features a hovering square of indigo to the upper left of its center, and tiny flecks of red pigment across its surface that look accidental. A small painting composed of many daubs of pink and red pigment, Little Steps, made me think of late Philip Guston, but is entirely abstract. Steel, a mostly gray painting with irregular rivulets of paint running diagonally through its middle, is the essence of a rainy day.

Besides Guston, Wolovitz has clearly looked at the work of three British painters - the luscious colorist Howard Hodgkin, and the rich impastoers Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach - but she is consciously rougher and a more resolute abstractionist than any of those four. Her paintings suggest things and events we sense around us, atmospherically and physically, but have never precisely seen.

Seen in dreams

There are few actual paintings in "The Wolf Man Paints," at the Slought Foundation, and the paintings that are included are uniformly stiff landscapes. But this exhibition of mostly photographically reproduced works by Sigmund Freud's patient, the autodidact Sergius Pankejeff - nicknamed for his famous painting of five wolves in a tree remembered from an early childhood dream - is so quirky and meticulously researched that anyone interested in psychology and the interpretation of images seen in dreams will find it fascinating.

Interestingly, though Pankejeff was most attracted to and admiring of landscape painting, portraiture was his strength.